Shakespeare at the British Council

It’s been said that art has the power to transform, to illuminate, to educate, inspire and motivate. The British Council Arts team certainly concurs with this view. Their programme cuts across all the art genres to do just that. 

This year the programme is placing a special emphasis on one of Britain’s greatest British exports, Shakespeare, as part of the British Council’s global ‘Shakespeare Lives Programme’ which commemorates the 400th anniversary of the playwrights death. 

“Shakespeare plays such a big part in the national curriculum for Sri Lanka in terms of English studies, but we wanted to show that his work gives us so much more than that,” said British Council’s Arts Manager Tanya Warnakulasuriya. 

“Many of the human issues that feature in his stories – gender inequality, racial hatred, love, jealously, power and politics, still dominate modern societies all over the world including ours. Shakespeare was a master innovator. He invented over a thousand new words in English that we still use in the language today, like ‘accommodation’, ‘theatre’, and ‘laughable’, as well as phrases such as ‘Laughing stock’ and “Heart of gold”. He also taught us about the power of language to move people to action, and he didn’t use a PowerPoint presentation to show us these things!” 

The British Council Arts programme is keen to inspire young people studying the bard for O-Level and A-Level and show that learning Shakespeare can be fun and equip them with key critical thinking skills if they understand his work as more than just an English text to be rote learned for exams. 

To show how exciting Shakespeare can be, Sri Lanka’s British Council Arts has partnered with The Workshop Players as their new Artists-in-Residence, to present Sri Lanka’s first ever ‘Shakespeare in the Park’, performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice at the Vihara Maha Devi park auditorium in April and May 2016.

The Workshop Players’ Artistic Director, Jerome De Silva explained why ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ was such an important project, “There is a big interest in Shakespeare in Sri Lanka, especially amongst students, academics and university students. Also there is a keen interest among translators. By doing Shakespeare in the Park, we make his work more accessible to the bigger audience.”

As well as theatre the Arts team are partnering with the Sri Lanka Foundation to show Shakespeare films, adaptations and also the new genre of “Filmed Theatre” from London, in a year-long film programme starting this April. The movies will be accompanied by panel discussions and fringe events looking at the themes of the story. 

Tanya also goes on to explain what other art genres that Shakespeare had impact on. “He also taught us about the rhythm of speech. He cleverly used the speech rhythms to differentiate between groups of characters. For example in Macbeth we see the noblemen speaking in Iambic Pentameter and the witches speaking in Throchaic Tetrameter to differentiate them from the ordinary folk in the play.”

These rhythms and words will be explored more with Sri Lanka’s young musicians and rappers who will be collaborating in a workshop with a Hip Hop poet and Rapper from the UK, who is already working with the Royal Shakespeare Company to show young people how “cool” Shakespeare really is.

Art lovers who are not fans of Shakespeare, should not despair, as there are also other events going on that hopefully will pique your interest. Film screenings, panel sessions, and musical performances are all scheduled to happen throughout the year. For more information keep an eye out on www.britishcouncil.lk/programmes/arts.